Cognitive assistive robotics for the elderly and the physically challenged

过去几十年来在医药和保健方面取得的进步提高了预期寿命，但也导致了一个老龄化社会，其中很大一部分涉及老年人和残疾人，他们迫切需要直接的身体援助和日常护理。这导致了与提供给他们的服务和护理相关的费用暴涨。我们在本提案中探索了一种替代方案，通过开发一类被称为认知辅助机器人系统的智能机器来最小化这些成本，并减轻医疗保健提供者的负担，其主要任务是支持和提供老年人/残疾人的基本需求和帮助。为了赋予与人类自然交互的能力，这些系统需要具有认知功能，使它们能够在一定程度上识别人类的意图，在某些情况下预测人类的行为，并对人类用户提出的一些基本请求作出适当的响应。所设计的机器人系统应该能够储存知识并向人类学习有用的技能。开发一个智能不完全手工编码的辅助机器人系统需要广泛利用现有的先进机器人技术和机电一体化技术，并开发新型算法和人机交互系统，允许与人类进行无缝和几乎自然的交互，其中感知、推理和行动计划能力是关键因素。为了应对这些挑战并实现设计认知辅助机器人系统的目标，本研究在一个灵活的框架内集成了许多模块，包括机器注意、自然人机交互、行为和增量学习以及行动计划。这些都是与申请人的专业知识相关的领域。该提案解决了认知辅助机器人领域成熟和发展中的一些问题。它将为提高这一领域的知识、培训高素质人员提供极好的机会，并可能在（辅助性质的）服务机器人领域产生商业上可行的替代方案，无论是供医院使用还是供家庭使用。

Progress witnessed in medicine and health care over the past decades has increased life expectancy but has led to an aging society, a good portion of which involves elderly and disabled individuals who are in dire need for direct physical assistance and day to day care. This has induced skyrocketing costs associated with the services and care provided to them. We explore in this proposal an alternative to minimize some of these costs and to alleviate the burden on the health care providers by developing a class of intelligent machines termed as cognitive assistive robotic systems, the main task of which is to support and provide basic needs and assistance for an elderly/disabled individual. To impart natural interaction capabilities with humans, these systems need to have cognitive features allowing them to recognize to a certain extent human intentions, to predict human behavior under certain circumstances and to respond adequately to some basic requests made by the human user. The robotic system designed should be able to store knowledge and to learn useful skills from humans. Development of an assistive robotic system in which the intelligence is not entirely hand-coded requires extensive exploitation of existing advanced robotics and mechatronics technologies and the development of new types of algorithms and human-machine interactions systems allowing for seamless and almost-natural interaction with humans where perception, reasoning, and action planning capabilities are key factors. To deal with such challenges and to fulfill the goal of designing a cognitive assistive robotic system, the proposed research integrates within a flexible framework a number of modules involving machine attention, natural man-machine interaction, behavioral and incremental learning and action planning. These are all fields pertinent to the applicant's expertise. The proposal tackles a number of issues in the maturing and evolving field of cognitive assistive robotics. It should lead to excellent opportunities for the advancement of knowledge in this field, the training of highly qualified personnel and could also potentially lead to commercially viable alternatives in the field of service robotics (of assistive nature) whether for hospital or home use.